Reagan and the Moral Imagination

T. Kenneth Cribb on the moral imagination of Ronald Reagan :

In 1977 Reagan told Dick Allen, his long-time foreign policy advisor: “My idea about the Cold War is that we win and they lose.”

It is almost impossible to convey to you today what an unthinkable thought that was in 1977, or in 1980, or even in 1985. Many of Reagan’s own advisors interpreted his rhetoric as mere rhetoric; even the most hawkish among them could not really imagine the possibility of completely eradicating the Soviet Union. This was unthinkable even as late as 1989 and 1990, a period during which the first President Bush’s administration went to heroic diplomatic lengths to try to keep the Soviet Union intact. But in the end, Ronald Reagan was right and the experts were wrong. And as a result, tens of millions of people throughout Eastern Europe are among the world’s most fervent Reaganites. In the pro-American, enthusiastically democratic crowds of competent and confident young Eastern Europeans, we see the human faces of those millions who were so blandly relegated to political slavery by the pacifist and détentist intellectual elites of the West.
How could this have been so? How could Reagan, a mere “actor,” have been so right where so many experts were so wrong. The moral imagination is a theme originated by the political philosopher Edmund Burke, developed by the poet T. S. Eliot, and elaborated by the historian of ideas Russell Kirk. It simply means the capacity to form an image of a more perfect moral order as a precondition for achieving that moral order.

Unlike the experts, Ronald Reagan could envision a world without the Evil Empire. Indeed, he believed it was his moral responsibility to imagine a world without this evil. And then, he acted. Reagan’s actions had a real effect in the world, but perhaps the key impact of Reagan’s vision was that he made it possible for those oppressed by Soviet tyranny also to imagine their own freedom, to breathe the spirit of liberty, and so to act as free men. Such is the power of the moral imagination.